Hilde Tuinstra

NOTES

GDR Diary 2: Read-In for the possibility of community

Last Friday I participated in the Read-In and the group addressed several important issues from this experience in the feedback session after “reading-in”: the almost instant legitimization of the reading group when referred to as an artistic project, having as its consequence the access to an otherwise unvisitable private space; the legitimacy and ethical implications of bringing a preselected text into our host’s house versus following the host’s own suggestion, albeit with the risk of unexpectedly transforming a speculative action into the provision of a social service; the process of reading a text (its collective translation, interpretation and discussion) as a mediator of the interaction between hosts and visitors, and a subtle articulator of class, gender and ethnicity positions; photographic documentation that has archival intentions versus its possible interpretation as one of observation or surveillance and so on.

The search for community in Yang’s work is connected to a sense of place that is constructed by an individual experience struggling with abstract parameters. In this sense it is imaginary, but not utopian, and is best described through the notion of a “community of absence” or “negative community,” which is characterized by a lack or a denial of any sense of belonging. Einarsson and Yang use concepts of a dystopian, imaginary community in their work, which open up a space of potentiality. (…) The diversity and creativity of participation in experimental communities, the playful “care of the self” of informal communities, and the being-together of imaginary communities that build on the state of absence, correspond to a fragmented and agonistic public space. The concept of a “community” that refuses to function as a manipulative mass united by a common identity eventually implies the potential of resistance. (Nina Möntmann, “Transforming Communities”, 2007, pp. 50-1).

In “A Small Dictionary for Haegue Yang”, Doryun Chong (2008) also points to of the idea of community in Yang’s work.
A community is an entity — a concept — that can be empowering and potent, idealistic and utopian, dysfunctional and even destructive. Despite the generally positive social implications it holds, the idea of community is at once complex and oversimplistic, strong and fragile. (…) Yang interprets what she calls the “community of absence” as a “community of the plural that shares nothing but ongoing self-examination and a strange kind of optimism”. Her interpretation is partly inspired by discussions between Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Luc Nancy around Georges Bataille, specifically in Nancy’s La communauté desoeuvré and Blanchot’s La communauté inavouable. Nancy’s reading of Bataille is critically indebted to Blanchot’s notion of désoeuvrement (…). Through this notion, both thinkers try to grasp Bataille’s concept of a community that does not rely on “work”, which is central to the idea of communism and necessarily defines human beings as producers. (…) It is in this light that Blanchot and Nancy try to steer “community” away from “work” and toward “inoperative” “nonwork” that must remain “unavowable” – that is, the community that refuses to acknowledge itself. Both see that when the community is recognized as such, it ceases to be. (pp. 143-4)